What is Project X?

At the Writer’s Retreat, Andrew mooted the idea of writing a TV episode collaboratively, from the ground up, and then filming it. The idea would be to approach the whole thing collaboratively. We would begin, in a Writers’ Room scenario, with first of all deciding on the premise, negotiating and agreeing what the broad genre, key characters, location and approximate plot would be. Then the outline would be worked up, before being broken down into a full scene-by-scene breakdown, all collaboratively. Individual members would then be allocated scenes to write, and when the whole thing is assembled, the edits and critiques would again be done as a group. When we have a script we’re all happy with, then we’d arrange to film it.

Some of this could be done in the meetings, the rest online via email, Google Hangouts, collaborative documents, or whatever digital means we have at our disposal.

There is no denying this will all take some time to agree each stage, we all have different interests and styles. But it would be an interesting and educational experiment in writing in a situation where one doesn’t have full control of the output.

Those people who expressed an interest at the last London Writers’ Circle meet-up wracked their brains and come up with a dizzying array of story proposals, and the next step is to collate votes and then discuss the short list of ideas.